OK, it's safe to come back now.

The ugly bugs will be here no more, I'm kicking my hornet habit and resisting the temptation to tell you all about the one I saw today, first having heard it, chomping wood from an old plank at the bottom of the garden, or of how my very brave friend A reported seeing a bunch of them drunk on sap on one of her ash trees, then got so fed up with one that kept coming and swiping honeybees from her sedum flowers that she swatted it into a jam jar and saw to its demise.  It's helped a bit, learning and talking about them, but I don't find them really any less repellent, and Tom's threatened to stop reading this if I don't stop creeping him out about them, and I don't suppose he's the only one who feels that way.  But sometimes it seems like you just have to stay with horrible and uncomfortable things for a bit.  Not forever, though.

So just to take away the taste of chewed wasp, here's a collage and some Rilke .  No one does autumn better than Rainer-Maria.

Blue Hydrangea

These leaves are like the last green

in the paint pots - dried up, dull and rough,

behind the flowered umbels whose blue

is not their own, but mirrored from afar.

They reflect it tear-stained, vaguely

as if deep down they hoped to lose it;

and as with old blue writing paper

there's yellow in them, violet and grey;

Washed out as on a child's pinafore,

things that are finished with, no longer worn:

the way one feels a small life's brevity.

But suddenly emotion seems to flare

in one of the umbels, and one sees

a moving blue as it takes joy in green.

(From New Poems, 1907,  trans. Snow.  In German you can find it here. 

 I feel the italics are a bit of pedantic overkill, but if I don't use them someone will inevitably skip read and think I wrote it.  As if.  In my dreams.)